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The crowd in Oriental cities is made up of many elements, and in Morocco Turks, Jews and infidels, Berbers of the mountains, fanatics of the confraternities, Soudanese blacks and haggard Blue Men of the Souss, jostle the merchants and government officials with that democratic familiarity which goes side by side with abject servility in this land of perpetual contradictions.
The so-called Moors of Senegal and the Sahara, as well as those of Morocco, are chiefly a mixture of Berbers, Arabs and Negroes; but the present Moors located in the northern coast of Africa, are rather the descendants from the various conquering nations, and especially from renegades and Christian slaves. The term Moors is not known to the natives themselves.
These cavaliers are sometimes called spahis; they are composed of Moors, Arabs, Berbers, and all the native races in Morocco. They are usually plainly dressed, but, beneath the bournouse, many of them wear the Moorish dress, embroidered in the richest style. Some of the horses are magnificently caparisoned in superb harness, worked in silk and gold.
The same transmutive tendency appears, in lesser degree, in the saint-worship of the North African Berbers and in the pantheism of the Hindu Moslems both developments which Mohammed would have unquestionably execrated. These doctrinal fissures in Islam were paralleled by the disruption of political unity. The first formal split occurred after the accession of the Abbasides.
He had no Arabic, but spoke only "Shilha," the language of the Berbers, so it took some time to make all arrangements, including the stipulation that a proper meal for all the mules was to be given under the superintendence of M'Barak.
Four Berbers at the farther end were playing cards, and two Arabs that were chained to a column near the door squatted on the ground with a battered old draughtboard between them. From both groups of players came loud shouts and laughter and a running fire of expostulation and of indignant and sarcastic comment.
"To take no thought for the morrow" is the practice of all Moors, whether Arabs or Berbers: no Moor spends money on anything which will not bring him in immediate profit, and this accounts for the fact that trees and forests are never planted, or schemes started for working mines, or roads made, or bridges built; even if the capital were forthcoming, what would be the use of spending money only to be repaid little by little, year by year? a man may die before he profits for all his trouble!
The government in a country cursed by the tribal system must in the very nature of things be despotic: lawless tribes need the tyrant's hand of iron. To the fact of his being a despot the Sultan owes his security, coupled with one other reason. Arabs and Berbers alike are fanatics: religion is the air they breathe, the salt of life.
Afrikus, according to that author, was a king of Yemen who expelled the Berbers from Syria! Such derivation is, however, unadvisable. According to others he was the son of Abdullah. The written genealogies of the Somal were, it is said, stolen by the Sherifs of Yemen, who feared to leave with the wild people documents that prove the nobility of their descent.
What came before? What was the Fourth Sub-race? Well: I imagine we may have the relic, the sishta or seed of it, in the Hamitic peoples and languages: the Libyans, Numidians, Egyptians, Iberians, and Pelasgians of old; the Somalis, Gallas, Copts, Berbers, and Abyssinians of today. It seems to me then that we can almost get a glimpse of the sub-race preceding our own.
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